The New Republic

"Misha's shifting role model got the University of Kentucky's Robert Farley and I thinking during our Bloggingheads.tv dialogue:"  Grammar, please. Should be "me," not "I."

- satyendra

January 8, 2009 at 4:23pm

This is wonderful stuff. And there is a lot of fertile ground here for good argument. What may be missing in this incisive characterization is accounting for Falstaff, one of the greatest world eaters ever. His infinite vitality, I'd argue, has thematic significance and leads to this paradox: if Hal got "a different sort of popular education" he had to let Falstaff in, be transformed by him, even if ultimately he rejectedt him. There is, therefore, a particular tension in the relationship between Hal and Falstaff--a kind of simultaneous taking in and distancing--not simply a detached and self possessed studying of Falstaff. If that is right, then perhaps  Bush 43 and Obama define the extremes of the paradox: Bush immersing himself in tavern life, so to speak, without detachment; and Obama on the cool outside always looking in, always self possessed (even with all his teenage experimentation: what kid doesn't do that?).

I'd be interested to know what lessons on "governance and morality"--treating  the "and" in this phrase as conjunctive--or governance anyway, Hamlet and Macbeth have to offer. My immediate sense is that their literary magnificence notwithstanding, it confuses art and life to look to them for lessons on governance or on governance and morality.

But a great post anyway.

Itzik Basman

- basman

January 8, 2009 at 5:23pm

Thanks for your thoughtful reply, basman. The rejection of Falstaff is one of the greatest scenes in any play!! I do think Hal has obviously fallen for Falstaff in some way; he's legitimately affectionate with him as well as mocking -- as opposed to coolly analyzing some sort of qualities that he has, more in the Obama style as we understand it. Somebody suggested to me that Jeremiah Wright is Obama's Falstaff. The analogy is imperfect, but not in every way: I think Obama took up with Wright to get a certain kind of education, an immersion in a different and what might have seemed at some time a more "real" culture. And, of course, the rejection.

Lincoln above all was deeply moved by Claudius's soliloquy in Hamlet that begins "O, my offense is rank," in which Claudius realizes he can't escape judgment for his wrongs. Lincoln quotes it sometimes in his writings. There's a quote from him on it: "To be, or not to be," he wrote to an interlocutor, "'was merely a philosophical reflection on the question of life and death, without actual reference to future judgment'; whereas Claudius' speech showed 'force and grandeur' in its 'moral tone' as a 'solemn acknowledgment of inevitable punishment for the infraction of divine law.'" And he loved Macbeth for the same theme: The hands that can never get clean, the blood that won't wash out, the terrible metastasizing nature of sin, and the idea that thanks to some cosmic or godly justice one cannot eternally escape punishment for one's wrongs. It shows up in his second inaugural -- "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword," etc.

It's an idea about morality, but also governance, I suppose, in this way: Before and at the beginning of the war, L was a major advocate of the idea that if only the spread of slavery to the territories could be contained, slavery would just dwindle away without fanfare. His early policies reflected this hope. He had much more Claudius's view by the end of the war -- that great sins will be judged, and can't be let go so easily. I wouldn't say the plays alone *gave* him this view but I suspect they sharpened it and gave it language, as art does.

geez, I just geeked out!

- Eve Fairbanks

January 8, 2009 at 6:15pm

Gee, there are so many Prince analogues Misha and Barack can strive to emulate:

Prince Charming?

Prince Caspian?

The frog-prince?

The Prince of Wales?

Prince Albert in a can?

But given they are both politicians scrambling to stay on top of an increasingly vacuous 24/7 newscycle, they must learn to perfect as many public personas as the most gifted of all character actors.

Therefore, I think a far more appropriate progenitor might be the Prince they already are: the daunting dissembler Prince of Niccolo Machiavelli fame.

Barack Obama has already proven to be so adept in the art of dissimulation that no one knows who is more confused about him---liberals or conservatives.

george walton

- iambiguous

January 8, 2009 at 6:49pm

Top Ten Real/Fictional Role Models for Barack Obama:

10. Mary Tyler Moore

9. Apple II computer

8. Quarter pounder with cheese

7. Cancun

6. God

5. The Heimlich maneuver

4. 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air Two-Door Hardtop

3. Putney Swope

2. Rocky the Flying Squirrel

and the No. 1 Real/Fictional Role Model for Barack Obama:

1. Barack Obama

- williamyard

January 8, 2009 at 8:04pm

Eve Fairbanks:

...Somebody suggested to me that Jeremiah Wright is Obama's Falstaff. The analogy is imperfect, but not in every way: I think Obama took up with Wright to get a certain kind of education, an immersion in a different and what might have seemed at some time a more "real" culture. And, of course, the rejection...

"Somebody" has an enviablly expansive mind. Imperfect though it may be, the analogy is great, right up to the Rev's obvious earthiness. I'll want to think more about it.

Here is something to consider (written once in another life by someone I know pretty well):

_________________

When Hamlet finds Claudius bent over, back to him, seemingly at prayer, he does

not know that Claudius is unable to pray. The curse of primal fallenness has taken root in

the core of Claudius' soul:

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon't;

A brother's murder. (3.3.36-38)

In this world there is no salvation as earth-bound meanings increasingly emerge and

predominate; and so there is no salvation or redemption from fratricide. As argued,

Claudius' evil is the source of Denmark's corruption, infecting office and the rule of law.

Claudius' analysis of justice's corruption has been quoted, but is well-worth repeating:

In the corrupted currents of this world

Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice,

And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself

Buys out the law. (3.3.57-60)

Claudius' acute diagnosis recalls Hamlet's list of "Th' oppressor's wrongs" including "the

law's delay" and "The insolence of office" (3.1.73-74). The mention of "corrupted

currents" recalls Hamlet's "sea of troubles" and thought turning "currents [...] awry." The

counterpoise of revenge and justice, revenge following from the absence of justice, goes

to part of the heart and source of Hamlet's tragic dilemma. The flow of corruption

commodifies the law—“Buys out the law"—such that it is but a gilded imitation of itself.

The law, justice’s instrument , inverted, becomes the instrument of injustice, all the while

attempting to dress itself as justice’s means. In this, the law becomes detached from

justice, which gets shoved by; and the law as injustice’s means buoys Claudius, suiting

his purposes. In this world, the hand of raw power, however gilded in finery, can push

justice aside. That is to say, raw power parades as majesty, professing itself to be the

legitimate source of order and justice; but, in actuality, power inverts order and justice by

its corrupting use of justice’s own instruments.

For justice, as an ideal, is part of the good; it is order and proportion radiating

social harmony, civility and fairness - in short, radiating the bonds of the human. It is a

light that shines fleetingly, if at all, on this world. Claudius knows enough to know

clearly that,

'tis not so above.

There is no shuffling; there the action lies

In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,

Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,

To give in evidence. (3.3.60-64)

Thus Claudius, at one with his own evil and utterly immersed in it, has here clarity more

sturdy and acute than Hamlet's tormented pondering. Claudius' clarity flows from his

insight into and acceptance of his own wickedness, from his resignation to it. He

understands an absolute goodness to be a heavenly standard that can measure men's

souls. Unremitting in his harsh judgment of himself, he manifests the odd virtue, for him,

of a kind of intellectual honesty. Realizing himself in his own evil actions, and at one

with his own nature, he ruthlessly refuses to disassociate consequences from conduct. He

must, he forces himself to conclude, at bottom be unrepentant, for he even refuses to

relinquish the fruits of his evil actions:

But, O, what form of prayer

Can serve my turn? "Forgive me my foul murder"?

That cannot be, since I am still possessed

Of those effects for which I did the murder,

My crown, mine own ambition and my queen. (3.3.51-55)

In truth, one may not "be pardoned and retain th' offense” (3.3.56), even though on earth

power's inversion of justice to injustice can purchase a kind of immunity. He stares

unflinchingly at the lesser reality of his own power when measured by the good as truth,

his punishment the torment of soul issuing from his holding of himself to the highest

standards.

"Shuffling," therefore, is the sheer attenuation of the good on earth, the insidious

indirectness of Polonius or the tragically imbued twisting and turning of Hamlet. Truth as

an absolute measure, in revealing the “true nature” of actions, contrasts with "shuffling."

Truth measures the lesser reality of power, its shadowiness, just as Hamlet, Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern jest about ambition being but a shadow's shadow. Literality is that

which sees the gild for what it is not, mistaking the surface for the depths; but, more

profoundly, literality is the limited consciousness of a society that is unaware both of the

evil that rots it and unattainable good.

The paradox of consciousness in Hamlet at this point is that he understands more than most, and refuses as of yet to give in either to complete passivity or to immoral action—the evil of two lessers,3 so to speak—the only alternatives his world can offer him. But, caught between these two unacceptable extremes, all he can do is veer distractedly from thought to promises to himself of hot action. And one way of understanding Hamlet’s tragedy is that it is impossible for him to conceive of, and hence follow, a moral course of action: his world can offer him none. Thus, unlike Claudius, it is Hamlet's relative but weak virtue that, "shuffling," he temporizes, rationalizes and procrastinates. His vacillations are his failing struggle against the imperatives of unsatisfactory absolutes, marking his desperately ebbing superiority and his tragically occluded vision.

Although for a moment Hamlet could have drunk hot blood, action and thought

clash in his opportunity to stab Claudius in the back while Claudius failingly attempts to

pray, failingly attempts to humble himself before God. (Claudius cannot pray; his pride,

his ambition and his assertion of his appetitive self are all too strong; his spirit is too

weak.) Immediately on seeing Claudius bent over, back to him, Hamlet says to himself:

Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying,

And now I'll do it. And so a' goes to heaven,

And so am I revenged. That would be scanned. (3.3.73-75)

In this scanning, rationalizing (the will's failure seeking excuses) and instrumental

reasoning (reasoning the means of unquestioned ends) converge, making it impossible to

know where one starts and the other stops. To kill a repenting Claudius, Hamlet reasons,

would send him packing to heaven while King Hamlet was murdered unrepentant, "With

all his crimes broad blown" (3.3.81). Between the slaying of a repentant Claudius and an

unrepentant King Hamlet, there is no reciprocity, no eye for an eye. Such a killing lacks

the lustre of revenge; it is a cheap shot: "Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge”

(3.3.79). Killing "hire and salary" debases revenge; it commodifies it. It lacks spirit. How

to inspirit revenge:

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,

Or in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed,

At game a-swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in't-

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damned and black

As hell, whereto it goes. (3.3.87-95)

This language, as all the language in this soliloquy, is free of both the stuttering stops and

starts and the rhetorical excesses that have marked Hamlet's prior broodings and

excitements. A cold calm, however temporizing, is descending on him. There is some

ease, a freeing up of conscience, in his bloody-minded dissection of homicidal means.

While Claudius struggles in vain with deep pangs of conscience's torments and is

intellectually rigorous in rejecting false consciousness, Hamlet's descent has him

overtaken by a pure consideration of means. There had been a comparative virtue in

Hamlet's vacillations in contrast with Claudius' resignation to the worst of himself; but

now the comparison is between Claudius' clarity in discerning the "true nature" of his acts

and Hamlet's occluded, sophistic distinctions between a well-planned bloodletting

revenge and a mere contract killing. In Hamlet's scanning, heaven and hell (in Claudius'

surmises, the true reflections of good and evil) are parodied down to encompass the evershrinking bounds of his moral consciousness. By Hamlet’s absurd lights, mere repentance will be enough to get Claudius to heaven, brother killing notwithstanding; but murdering Claudius in the heights of loutish satiety will ensure Claudius’ trip to hell.

The sprinkling of images of food and flavouring—“took my father grossly full of

bread," "no relish of salvation," "fit and seasoned for his passage"—gives Hamlet's

scanning a macabre playfulness. It does a light Yeatsian dance: "Then trip him, that his

heels may kick at heaven." This dancing playfulness, buoyed by the exuberance of

homicidal possibilities, suggests in Hamlet a sense of relief and release both in the

conjuring up of a ground on which to defer action and in the now even clearer

commitment to take revenge. If instrumental reasoning is reasoning from ends to means

without questioning the ends, then Hamlet murderously exemplifies it in unquestioningly

probing and refining the means of his killing.

Hamlet's reasoning here is the answer, for the moment, to the question "To be, or

not to be." It is the false promise of being manifest in the action of revenge. This

reasoning—in the imagery and metaphors of shadows and lessening— is, as noted,

reasoning's shadow. It is a sophistry akin to the structure of apparent order in Denmark,

which rests on and is infected by a rotten foundation. Here Hamlet's reasoning proceeds

from monstrous premises: slay Claudius in the back while Claudius is seemingly bent in

prayer; or slay him at the insensate heights of satiety. Those choices rest on the

foundation of the rightness of revenge. The presumption of that foundation gives it a

succour that lends a kind of energy and delight to the contemplation of means evident in

the macabre playfulness. Thought would have "sicklied o’er" this "native hue of

resolution." Sophistry abets it.

In irony, while Claudius exercises power through his manipulation of form,

within himself he rejects mere form. In contrast to Hamlet, who does not know himself,

Claudius, in apprehending the distance between reality on earth and the reality he

envisions "above," can take no solace from mere words. He knows that he fails at

“thoughts” that result in the taking within himself of the good, that contain the inner

substance of themselves and that are not simply verbal husks: “My words fly up, my

thoughts remain below./ Words without thoughts never to heaven go”(3.3.97-98).

A deeper meaning emerges here, however Claudius fails at prayer, which is the

subversion of Christianity's predominance over the human. Between the poles of

Claudius’ tough-minded inability to repent and Hamlet's absurd concern with salvation

through repentance as an obstacle to what he perceives to be a just revenge, rests

Shakespeare's rejection of repentance as a means of salvation.

The deep torments plaguing Claudius' soul are the existential facts of evil's depths. A brother's murder cannot be, nor should it be, assuaged by mere repentance. That is the underlying truth of Claudius' inability to pray, even beyond his refusal to forgo the fruits of his primal crime. There is no form of words, no form of healing action, that can offer salvation, because nothing can right a crime stamped permanent by death, and particularly one that lacerates the deepest bonds of the human—a brother killing his brother. This world permits no sacrifice in atonement. Heaven and hell are but the mind’s ideas. Hamlet catering to the ease of their satisfaction while "scanning" reproves their significance and proves their insignificance. The driving out of Christianity from nearly all consideration—and where it shows up, it is savaged—as the action of the play proceeds to its horrible culmination reaches its heights in the graveyard scene. There, death and worms seem to loom as the sole measures of life. In part, the tragedy of Hamlet resides in Shakespeare's rejection of salvation under any circumstances. The diminishment of Christianity is part of the play's subversion of any signs of redemptive hope into a bleak emptiness. If there is any hint at salvation, it is only by the remote implication of a distant ideal. That implication is this: any salvation will be found on earth. As fallenness is a matter of some men’s nature, it is defined by the criteria of the human, specifically by the criterion of human bonds informed by imaginative sympathy. In this, the play's tragedy is defined by a potentiality that perhaps awaits and holds within itself the idea of the birth of the human.

_________________________________

All that said, I cannot but think that interpeting literature or seeing it through political actors' eyes and then either way reading it back to what they did or what politicians might do is but intellectuals' chatter. Great chatter, the stuff of some lives,  that I do not for one minute diminish, but, rather, seek properly to but into context.

Respectfully, there is nothing in what you have writte that persuades me that there are lessons about governance that great literature can impart. Claudius has an admiringly clear view of himself and his sin, but it is nothing he can grow from. Rather his clarity is of a piece with his resignation to what is worst about himself, which  gets increasingly illuminated and undercut as the play proceeds. The closest I can bring Lincoln to Hamlet is Lincoln's sheer torture, physical suffering really, before making a decision. There is something of Hamlet in that. But I have read, that unlike Hamlet, Lincoln, once deciding, came to be at peace with himself regardless of the enormous consequences of his decisions. This had, I understand, something to do with Lincoln's profound understanding--like Obama I daresay, of his own obligations, his limitations, God's vigilance and what was beyond what he controlled. A difference, I'd argue, is that Hamlet can never get past his inabiity to make moral choices in an immoral world and finally succumbs to an amoral accommodation to to the world as it is.

What I say may or may not be presuasive, but I trust it might be part of an interesting and important conversation. Literature, I think, artfully and autonomously reflects and illuminates reality--mirror and lamp and so on. It precribes nothing, is a guide to no practical action, and helps not at all with hard choices people, political actors, anyone at all really, have to make.

Itzik Basman

- basman

January 8, 2009 at 11:24pm

Forgive me the length, nattering and typos, misspellings, etc. of the above. The length is kind of unlike me. The rest is me 24/7.

- basman

January 8, 2009 at 11:46pm